Protests continue as China passes draconian law punishing Falun Gong

Published: Sunday, October 31, 1999

BEIJING Calling Falun Gong an unprecedented threat to communist rule, China's legislature paved the way Saturday for leaders of the banned spiritual movement to be given lengthy prison terms and the death penalty at upcoming trials.

Nearly unanimous passage of a new anti-cult law by the legislature's executive committee inside the Great Hall of the People came as defiant Falun Gong followers trickled into adjacent Tiananmen Square for a sixth day of peaceful, largely passive protests.

Embarrassed by the demonstrations and under orders to quash them, police widened their security net to capture thousands of Falun Gong followers who have slipped into Beijing from around the country. Uniformed police questioned people on streets, and plainclothes officers trained high-powered binoculars on the vast square.

At least 30 followers were taken away from the square. One woman cried, and she and several others separately pressed hands in a gesture of prayer after they were placed inside a police minibus.

By tightening the law on cults, the communist government sped up the trials of principal members already in custody. But the need for new measures shows how threatened Chinese leaders feel by Falun Gong and how undaunted its followers remain more than three months into a ban on the widely popular group.

In passing the law 114-0 with two abstentions, senior legislators called Falun Gong "unprecedented in the 50-year history of the People's Republic in terms of its size of organization, influence, number of illegal publications as well as the damages it brought to the society," the government's news agency, Xinhua, said.

With the vote, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress ordered police and prosecutors on "full alert of cult activities and smash them rigorously," Xinhua reported.

The law revises a section of the criminal code to make leaders of Falun Gong and other group's labeled cults liable for prosecution for murder, fraud, endangering national security and other crimes punishable by more than the 2- to 7-year prison terms allowed for most organizers under the current statute.